Crime Specialization in Rural British Columbia, Canada

Abstract

L'article avance l'argument qu'il faut compléter les taux de criminalité traditionnels par des quotients de l'emplacement des crimes (QEC) afin d'expliquer les tendances de criminalité au sein d'environnements ruraux. Bien qu'elle ait été ignorée auparavant, la surreprésentation de la violence rurale doit être évaluée afin de réduire la criminalité. Une étude se concentrant sur les infractions contre les biens et les crimes violents dans la province canadienne de la Colombie-Britannique démontre une différence marquée dans la distribution des types précis de criminalité, ce qui indiquerait la possibilité d'une différence urbaine-rurale en matière de causes de la criminalité. Cet article démontre que, en Colombie-Britannique, les zones rurales peuvent être considérées comme étant des zones qui se spécialisent dans les crimes violents.Mots clés : violence rurale, criminalité rurale, taux de criminalité, quotient de l'emplacement, Colombie-BritanniqueThe article presents an argument for supplementing traditional crime rates with crime location quotients (LQC) for purposes of explaining crime patterns within rural environments. Although largely ignored in the past, the overrepresentation of rural violence requires assessment for crime reduction purposes. Focusing on property and violent offences distributed across the Canadian province of British Columbia, there is a sharp divide in terms of the distribution of specific types of crime that reflects the possibility of an urbanrural difference in terms of crime causation. This article demonstrates that, in British Columbia, rural areas might be considered to be areas that specialize in violent offending.

The business of farm crime: evaluating trust in the police and reporting of offences

“…The headline self-report figures suggested that farm crime was highly prevalent in the area and had been experienced by approximately half of the sample; theft of machinery and livestock were the main targets. The figures analysed here are higher than estimates (1-in-4) the source of these criminal enterprises was associated with organised criminal networks travelling into the area and resonates with the findings of Mawby (2015) and others (including findings in the NCRM, 2018 report) in recognising the importance of place in understanding criminal behaviour in rural communities (Carleton, Brantingham and Brantingham, 2014). However, with the number of prosecutions being relatively low, it is difficult to confirm these suspicions; potentially these concerns are more indicative of generalised trust in the community and potential vulnerabilities associated with a lack of confidence in the police to adequately respond to and protect the farming community from crime.…”

“…• 91% of victims reported the crime • 49% of victims indicated machinery was the primary criminal target • 30% of victims indicate stock was the primary criminal target • 33% of victims felt the crime was committed by a local person Clear opportunities exist here to address crime prevention at a basic level through both raising awareness of crime targets and through focused campaigns reflecting robust situational crime prevention techniques (cf. Barclay and Donnermeyer, 2002;Brantingham, Brantingham & Taylor, 2005;Carleton, Brantingham and Brantingham, 2014). Although near nine-out-of-ten offences were purportedly reported to the police, only half of respondents Crime Prevention and Community Safety https://doi.org/10.1057/s41300-019-00083-5 stated that they were satisfied by the police response, citing an apparent lack of interest and slow response times as the main features for this lack of approval (see Ruddell and Jones, 2018).…”

An exploration of right-wing extremist incidents in Atlantic Canada

“…An interdisciplinary meta-review of scholarly articles that present a comprehensive definition of rurality within the Canadian context was conducted, with the intention of informing a consistent and robust use of the concept in the current study. This review indicated a lack of consensus over the definition of rurality, with some researchers defining rurality as a function of population density (e.g., Carleton et al, 2014), while others chose population cut-offs (e.g., population centres with more or less than 10,000 residents) as their primary method of distinction (e.g., Sibley & Weiner, 2011). Ultimately, the current paper's definition of rurality is a slightly modified version of the definition employed by Parker, Jackson, Dykeman, Gahagan, and Karabanow (2012), whose study of harm reduction in Atlantic Canada defines rurality as those towns and villages that fall outside of the commuting zones (roughly 20 km) of the region's seven largest population centres (>100,0000).…”

“…3 Furthermore, the previous empirical literature on Canadian far-right extremism has primarily focused within and around urban centres and within a limited number of provinces where right-wing groups were most active (see, Perry & Scrivens, 2015). While research into the effect of rurality on crime rates is relatively well documented (e.g., Carleton, Brantingham, & Brantingham, 2014;Francisco & Chenier, 2005;Wells & Weisheit, 2004), very few researchers have specifically studied the relationship between rurality and right-wing extremism. As a result, there remains much that we do not know about the extent, nature, beliefs, and behaviours of currently active right-wing extremist groups in rural areas of Canada.…”

The Relative Utilization of Criminal Sanctions in Canada: Toward a Comprehensive Description of Sentencing Outcomes

“…While largely abandoned as a statistical tool in criminology toward the end of the 1990s (Andresen 2009), the technique has recently become very popular. In just the last few years, researchers have employed the measure in studies of land use characteristics and crime (Beconytė, Eismontaitė, and Romanovas 2012;Breetzke, Landman, and Cohn 2014;Groff and McCord 2012;McCord and Tewksbury 2012;Pridemore and Grubesic 2012), the crime prevention effectiveness of closed-circuit television cameras (Caplan, Kennedy, and Petrossian 2011;Lim, Kim, Eck, and Kim 2016;Piza, Caplan, and Kennedy 2014), connections between unemployment and crime specialization across geographic regions (Andresen and Linning 2015), and the identification of crime specialization in rural communities (Carleton, Brantingham, and Brantingham 2014).…”